Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 17:33:27 08/30/04
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On August 30, 2004 at 20:27:25, Steve Lim wrote: > >http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,95581,00.html > >The rise of servers and workstations based on Intel Corp.'s chips led to >significant declines in the prices of technical workstations, but the >performance of those systems hasn't kept up with the improvements enjoyed within >the supercomputing world, Hunter said. A modern supercomputer can run at well >over 1 trillion floating point operations per second (1 TFLOPS), whereas a >technical workstation based on Intel's Xeon processors is much closer to a PC in >terms of performance, he said. > >Scientists looking for floating-point performance who don't want to spend >millions on a supercomputer have resorted to clustering technology, Hunter said. >Clusters are an inexpensive way of amassing supercomputing power, but they are >difficult to maintain and they force scientists to coordinate with colleagues to >schedule time on the cluster, he said. > >The Orion Cluster Workstation takes the idea of a cluster and puts it inside a >desktop machine. The company's first product, the DT-12, is a 12-node cluster >that measures 18.4 in. long by 24 in. wide by 3.8 in. high -- which is about the >same size as a conventional desktop PC. > >But this PC puts out about 18 GFLOPS of sustained performance and 36 GFLOPS of >peak performance under certain conditions. > >.... read on > >http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,95581,00.html "One advantage RISC and Itanium 2 workstations have over the Orion DT-12 is the ability to run 64-bit applications, taking advantage of the vast amounts of memory included with these systems. Orion considered using the 64-bit Athlon 64 processor from Advanced Micro Devices Inc., but that chip doesn't yet have the power characteristics of Transmeta's chip and Orion's potential customers were more interested in 32-bit applications, Hunter said. The motherboards used by the Orion workstation were custom-designed by the company. The standard board features 12 nodes and a 12-port Gigabit Ethernet switch. Each node is comprised of a 1.5-GHz Efficeon processor, an Ethernet port, and a dual inline memory module slot. A base configuration of Orion's DT-12 desktop system comes with 512MB of memory per node and a 160GB hard drive for between $9,000 and $10,000, said Marc Adams, vice president of business development at Orion." On using Itanium 2: Ouch. On $9000 to $10000 for a base model system: Ouch. I expect this to be a titanic lead balloon.
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